One State Leads the Way in New Gun Background Checks

National Carry Academy announced some facts and figures recently based on the FBI’s data. Hey, they did the research, so we don’t have to!

According to the data, Kentucky led the way with a whopping 421,247 background checks in the month of March alone. That figure amounts to nearly 10% of Kentucky’s population.

West Virginia, Illinois, Indiana, and Idaho are the remaining top 5 states with the highest percentage of a state’s residents who applied for new gun licenses. NCA says they looked at the number of background checks by state in the last available month (March 2018), and divided the number of background checks by each state’s population, to acquire the data.

The states with the least number of background checks per capita are Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, and Rhode Island. In Hawaii, there were 1,420 background checks for firearms in March, which is .1% of the population – 10 times less than in Kentucky.

Kentucky had by far the most total FBI queries, followed by Illinois (271,000), Texas (161,000), Florida (137,000) and California (136,000).

The regions with the least number of new gun owners per capita is the south, including Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.